Crytek Calls DirectX 11 Patch a "Gift to the High End"

Crytek says the DirectX 11 patch for Crysis 2 is "a gift to the high-end community," which was apparently a little let-down by the game's overly-accessible system requirements.

Gamers are a notoriously difficult lot to please. If a game does A, they want B; if a game does B, they want A. And if a game does A and B, it costs too damn much and the next two years' worth of DLC should have been included with the original release anyway. Take the Crysis games as an example. The original Crysis, released in 2007, was a decent shooter remarkable primarily for its jarring system requirements. Respectable gaming rigs qualified as minimum spec and nobody could play it at its glorious maximum settings because for all intents and purposes, the hardware needed to do so didn't exist.

"Crysis 1's intention was, if I were to play it three years later, it looks great. And it does, actually, it fulfilled that," Crytek CEO Cevvat Yerli told Gamsutra. "But it made it difficult for entry-level players."

Crysis became something of a poster boy for hyper-inflated PC system requirements, reflexively trotted out every time the non-stop, runaway expense of PC gaming came up for discussion. This fact didn't escape Crytek's notice.

"So with Crysis 2, we took a different direction, and it backfired a little bit," Yerli said.

It turns out that while baseline PC owners were unhappy because they had trouble running Crysis decently, the upper-tier crowd viewed the game as an ideal way to show off their muscular rigs and were unhappy because Crysis 2 didn't put the pedal to the metal. So now Crytek is gearing up to release the DirectX 11 patch for the game in what Yerli said was an attempt to "please everybody."

"This is much more like a gift to the high-end community," he said. "And I think gamers will appreciate that. It lifts up Crysis 2 and gives a sneak peak of how PC gaming will evolve in the future, if you support a high-end preference."

The Crysis 2 DirectX 11 patch, which will include a whole pile of visual upgrades and performance enhancements, will be unleashed on the world on June 27.